Arla and Mars are piloting a platform that helps their brands be “seen, surfaced, and preferred” by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
The companies are working with UK-based Azoma on a four month long generative engine optimisation (GEO) trial, using its platform to understand what customers are asking in AI search, and then create large language model-optimised content in response; identify the sources the AI engines cite and ensure they feature among them; and track their “share of voice rather than clicks”.
The work would initially cover “a selection of their brand portfolios”, said Azoma CEO Max Sinclair.
Smaller brands including matcha drink brand PerfectTed and protein bar brand David Protein are also working with Azoma on a “full service” basis.
Azoma was established “as soon as we saw ChatGPT launch” said Sinclair, who prior to launching Azoma worked at Amazon for six years, several of them in search. “We became convinced that LLMs was a much better technology for consumers to discover and purchase products online than traditional search.
“We recognised that for brands, the existing solutions that helped them optimise for keyword search would be obsolete in this new era,” Sinclair said. “Our sense was we would have time to establish ourselves while these incumbents would face the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ – that is, they would not want to admit to their existing customers the software they had built over 20 years could not help in this new era.”
The LLM-optimised content can take the form of product listings, FAQs or instructive blogs to answer recent customer questions.
As well as helping brands be “credibly cited” in places from which the AI engines draw, Azoma ensures brand websites are “technically optimised for LLMs in the back end”.
It also helps brands “track what we believe is the most important new input KPI – share of voice in AI” Sinclair told The Grocer.
The platform “orchestrates hundreds of thousands of natural, varied prompts on our customers’ behalf” to model “real-world shopper behaviour” and measure “how AI engines respond at scale”.
“Azoma does this across all the leading conversational platforms, capturing the raw answers and the exact sources they cite,” Sinclair said. “This daily data flow gives a holistic view of AI-driven conversations in real-time as well as how they change over time, and it underpins our dashboards and practical, actionable recommendations.”
Kelly Shaw, head of marketing at PerfectTed, said Azoma’s platform had been “instrumental in boosting top-of-funnel visibility among consumers searching for healthier energy drink alternatives” on ChatGPT and Perplexity. The partnership was contributing to “remarkable year-over-year revenue growth”, she added.
According to a report this week by Commerce, 33% of Gen Z and 26% of millennials prefer AI platforms for product research, with Gen Z nearly as likely to use AI platforms for product research as they are search engines. Some 41% of the 1,000 consumers from the UK, Australia and US used the AI platforms on a daily basis.
A separate Adobe survey in July found of those who use ChatGPT, 77% use it as a search engine. It also found two in three marketers and business owners planned to increase their focus on AI visibility this year.
According to latest SimilarWeb figures, ChatGPT was the seventh most visited website in the UK, ahead of LinkedIn and Wikipedia.
“Consumers’ behaviour is transforming,” Sinclair said.
OpenAI is currently seeking to partner with retailers and was “exploring an easy way for merchants to provide product feeds directly to ChatGPT, helping ensure more accurate, up-to-date listings”, it said. In June, the Financial Times, citing multiple people familiar with the proposals, reported OpenAI was planning to take a cut from online product sales made directly through ChatGPT, and was aiming to integrate a checkout system into the platform.
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